Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977) was an extraordinary Brazilian writer whose intense, mystical, and philosophically introspective fiction made her an icon of 20th-century world literature. Born into a Jewish family in Podolia, Ukraine, that fled anti-Semitic pogroms to northeastern Brazil when she was an infant, she stunned the Brazilian literary establishment at age twenty-three with her debut novel Near to the Wild Heart (1943).

Living abroad for nearly two decades as the wife of a Brazilian diplomat in Europe and the United States, Lispector returned to Rio de Janeiro to produce radical narrative experiments. In The Passion According to G.H. (1964), a bourgeois woman experiences a mystical existential breakdown after crushing and eating a cockroach. Her final masterpiece, The Hour of the Star (1977), portrayed the tragic, unnoticed life of an impoverished northeastern typist in Rio with searing metaphysical beauty.